Chocolate keeps the dementors away.

It's spring, and the fog of six months is finally lifting.  With it comes the lifting of a veil which, in a weird way, protected me from having to deal things quite so directly.  Today was not a good day.  We had rat lab in the class I teach, which consists of a lot of setup time, four hours of trying to make sure the students don't completely screw things up, and then another hour or two of cleanup.  It's called rat lab because it involves rats (duh), specifically rat blood pressure and heart rate response to various adrenergic drugs (don't ask).  It's long, complicated, chaotic, and incredibly messy.

I was OK until one of the lab groups named their rat.  Mind you I'd also named the rats -- I mark them all with colors and refer to them accordingly.  This works out until you run out of colors and start calling a rat "Bordello", which is all I could think of with red and black Sharpie stripes on his head.  Brownie and Bordello just absolutely refused to go down, we hit Brownie maybe 7 times with the urethane (icky stuff, not that this is relevant).  Anyway.  We do have a student in the class named P (no, she's not *actually* named "P", she has the same name as my now dead and incinerated ex-girlfriend).  But OK, no big deal, moving on.  It wasn't her group that named their rat, it was group C.

I'm not sure whether it was some sort of displaced sublimated breeding impulse, a desperate desire to find something to have in common, or just sheer boredom, but P and I decided to get a pet together.  We figured it would give me an excuse to come over, and it would give P something to do when I wasn't around (that her life had no interest or meaning to her without me there should have been a huge blinking warning sign, but I'd already passed by the other eleventy two blinking warning signs with my middle finger extended).  We (well, she) named her Spike.  Spike was actually the tamest rat I've ever met; for all P sucked at boundaries, she was exceptionally good at being a rat mommy.  Spike became a peripheral character in most of the amusing and annoying dramas that took place in our subsequent lives together.

"Take care of Spike for me." was the first of five sentences in her note.  The last, which I've sinced learned is incredibly common in these sorts of things, was "I'm sorry".  I didn't take care of Spike for her.  Partly it was not wanting to subject either myself or my wife to the reminder, partly I was worried my cats would eat her (and I knew I wasn't stable enough to handle it), and partly I wanted her siblings to have some sort of tangible reminder of her.  Spike went to live with P's mom and "the kids", where she lived happily for six months.

Rats don't live for long of course.  Spike certainly didn't.  P's mother was very much like her -- caught up in the moment emotionally, feeling everything so intensely and to the point of such incapacitation that her judgment, while possibly appropriate in a fairy tale world, sucks in the real one.  She fell apart, got on medication, fell apart some more, chased her sleeping pill with a drink one night and left Spike out where the dogs got to her.  It was disgusting and tragic with just a hint of hilarity and I hated myself for giggling a bit upon hearing it.  The last time I saw that rat alive she brought me to tears by remembering me by smell.

It's smell that usually gets me.  The smell of P's bedroom, a few days after her suicide by overdose, still comes back and sticks around.  At that stage of decay the major contributors to scent are various polyamines which result from the oxidation and enzymatic breakdown of various proteins, along with skatole and other components of released fecal matter.  It smells just enough like pussy during menstruation -- and even sometimes pussy not during menstruation, depending on the pussy -- to fuck me up real good.  Some days the smell just hangs around in my flashbacks and slaps me across the face until my eyes sting and water.

Today it wasn't the smell though.  It was the rats, the goddamn Sprague-Dawley rats who, frankly, haven't been paid an iota of attention and are by consequence wild as wild can be, but who turn all floppy and mellow after 1cc of urethane.  It was someone else naming one of them (i.e., not under my control and subject to the wonderful compartmentalization that has been my friend for 6+ months).  It was Brownie (my name, not theirs), who stayed perky after six fucking doses to the point where I was calling him Ratsputin.  When he finally went down, he went down hard, Cheyne-Stokes breathing, his bladder and bowels releasing (the latter thankfully plugged by the temperature probe).  Overdosing is a fucking ugly way to die, neither clean nor gentle, and in this case we couldn't let him go until we were done with him.

At 4:30PM I started yanking the cannulas from the rats and letting them bleed out.  By then they were anaesthetized to the point of being comatose, and it's non-recovery anyway, but I still shouldn't have been doing that.  I got them into the freezer, kept my shit together, had a beer with the instructor, went home.  I went to N (the elder)'s house, intending perfectly innocuous nookie.  I flew apart like a glass gyroscope struck with a hammer.  She definitely deserves better than that.  But then again, so did all the goddamn rats.

I haven't written in a good bit.  I had comprehensive exams to worry about, then we had an NIH grant application which kept me tracing confocal images and doing isopotentiality calculations (don't ask) pretty much day and night.  The knife wound from P's brilliant, if grotesque, act of sullen defiance scabbed over in the process.  It didn't heal as cleanly as I would have liked, but that's a secondary concern when you have to get up off the ground, pick up your gun and go fight the army of invading crustaceans.  I've had a few moments of catharsis since, but at the same time I know there's still a lot going on inside which I'm not entirely privy to.

I had a taste of it in the past couple of days.  At this point I can look at her photos without feeling like I've just stumbled into an opium den full of hungry but patient wolves.  There's no infatuation, and I'm not really in love with her.  The sexual response is still there, albeit blunted; I fully recognize this as creepy, but if there were a switch I would have turned it off already.  She's been showing up in dreams again, but usually just as a supporting character.

I never did have the explosion of anger towards her that everyone seemed to expect.  I alternate between dreading the possibility it might happen, and dreading the possibility it might not.  My vantage point has become sufficiently removed for me to see all the ways in which she was controlling and manipulating me.  That's typical in BPD, from what I understand, but most whom I've known directly or indirectly don't seem sophisticated enough to be the Machiavellian geniuses some make them out to be.  P certainly wasn't.  Instead it's as if she was stuck with the emotions and self-awareness of a child, but her intellect had developed enough to make the child dangerously effective.  She herself was -- and I still believe this -- oblivious of it by way of active disbelief, except in those rare moments when I could get her to admit "ok, I can see how *others* might take it way".  What's the old saying about horticulture? ("... but you can't make her think")

One of the ways in which we were opposites was that I define the self to include all the icky unconscious stuff, the darker motivations, and do my damndest to bring them into the sunshine and accept them as mine.  She actively, and consciously, declared the self ended where the light ceased to reach, and when she did something unkind, she simply declared she had no idea where it came from or was out of her control.  That we had such radically different beliefs should have been a sign, but I was so busy sticking my penis into her vagina that I didn't notice that any more than I noticed her incessant efforts to tame me and alienate me from my family were starting to bear fruit.

P billed herself as a submissive, which in a sexual sense she was, but temper tantrums (and her sort of suicide is pretty much the mother of all temper tatrums) seem to me like the antithesis of submitting one's will to reality.  I've been there, of course, trying to remove a screw with the wrong sized screwdriver, rationalizing "I could go get the right tool but I can make this work", and after three or four failed attempts I become so furious with a small piece of metal that I envision it as some snarling beast straight from the smoking pits of Hell and myself stabbing it until my arm gives out.  Beating your head against a brick wall is sheer folly; the brick wall doesn't give a shit, but you still want to do it sometimes.  It's the daily dalliance with sunk-cost fallacy we all engage in.

The straw that broke the camel's back with P and I wasn't that I was breaking up with her, but that I had ceased to believe in "us", ceased to believe that our relationship was worth saving.  It was sudden and new.  I was walking away, not just in word but in my heart, where it really matters.  But I'd never really fallen out of love with someone while dating them so I didn't do it at all gracefully.  Still, graceful or not, it got me out of the perfumed narcotic smoke before I lost or forgot the last pieces of me that I was unwilling or unable to give to her.  Six months later and "if I can't have it, well nobody can" echoes in my mind.  Not exactly the kindest words, but I left still capable of joy.

Joy is a weird thing for me.  Maybe some people experience it as a happy and pleasant thing, like warm sunshine on a beach or a giggly night with friends getting stoned beyond belief around a campfire.  To me it's nothing whatsoever like that ... it's a wild thing, overwhelming, like being struck by lightning and set on fire.  It's as painful as it is pleasurable, and the it feels like the only way to survive the experience is to let go of control and accept what comes.  The antithesis of joy isn't agony but apathetic mellowness.  Joy transforms irreversibly like a firestorm sweeping through a forest burning away the dead and dying trees.

I can remember a day one spring two years ago when I was on my way to evolutionary theory class.  It was one of those rare days here when the sun is actually bright enough you can't look at it.  The trees were in bloom.  I was early, so I stopped to look at one of them -- a dogwood I think -- pulling off a flower and holding it in my hand.  It was almost pure white, just the faintest hint of pink.  I looked into it, letting my eyes relax a bit, following the veins and creases.  In time I realized it sparkled, that all across its surface there were dozens, hundreds, maybe millions of little points of light.  And then that was all there was, purest light and color and form.  I forgot what I was holding, and that I was standing there holding it.  I forgot about class, about time, about words, about myself, and was suffused with joy.

I was startled by people exiting the building and realized I'd missed class.  I had been given the rarest opportunity, as Blake puts it in Auguries of Innocence,


It wasn't the first time nor the last.  I have moments like that when I'm traveling, or dancing at the fire, or watching the sun rise over the tide pools.  It can happen at the oddest times and places, welling up inside of me until the tears come.  Sometimes it's welcome, and other times I want to do something, anything, to make it stop before I dissolve.

Most of what gets passed off as beautiful is just shiny plastic, or at best, beauty safely locked behind a protective plexiglass window of premature cynicism and calculated numbness.  "OK class, we're going to go see the famous paintings now!"  No functioning state can afford to have its citizenry have unsanctioned and uncontrolled access to beauty and joy.  It's far too unpredictable and transformative.

Even outside the political implications it's a valid concern.  The problem with having these experiences, beyond the occasional worry I might wreck my car while I'm sobbing in rapture over blowing leaves, is that they overshadow all else.  Seeing what Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (bless you, N) called "the tree with the lights in it" has in some sense left me broken from the perspective of normal, rational society.  And while I can pretend to fit in and give a shit, I'm not very good at it, beause deep down inside me there's a fire burning.

The fire almost went out in the two years I dated P.  I almost forgot it was there, forgot I'd ever seen the flower, ever lost myself into sweat and fire and liquid oblivion.  It couldn't ever be taken from me, but I was damn close to giving it away willingly, until the river washed the haze from my eyes and brought me back to ground.

Since then things have gotten better in small and unsteady steps due in no small part to the efforts of others.  Last Thursday was one such step.   One of my favorite things to do while topping is to use contrasting sensations (wax and ice, flogging combined with pleasurable stimulation, etc.) to expand and transform -- quite literally, derange -- the senses.  It takes a certain finesse in not pushing too fast or too hard but instead catching their energy and synchronizing it, but when it works, it really works.    Last Thursday I had a truly outstanding dinner with N (the elder), "just something I threw together"  of course.  Five minutes into it, sumac and raisins spiraling around an axis of sweet/tart kumquats, the light bulb went off, and I realized I'd just been hoisted with my own petard.  My senses and heart opened wide in astonishment.

That night we went out to see one of the local bands play.  I'm not really into the bar scene; when I do go out, which isn't often, it's usually for the music.  My heart and senses were still wide open, my core ringing like a bell from the dinner with N.  I was ready to close off if need be, but fortunately this was a "groupie band" so nobody paid me any attention.  And for two blessed hours I danced until I tasted sweat and tears.  I'm sure I looked like a spastic freak, but when I was even aware of others' existence, I didn't care.  I was too possessed with joy for it to matter.

I suspect that I had it within me to help P find, in one metaphorical form or another, the death and rebirth she so desperately needed.  True it would have been incredibly arrogant for me to presume such a role to her, but I was already incredibly arrogant in that relationship (and outside of it).  One more presumption wouldn't have been the straw that broke the camel's ego.  No, what stopped me, in this case, wasn't humility, but selfishness.  I didn't want to lose her as a lover, and I knew that, to be reborn, she would need to leave me behind.  I wanted her to myself, and she offered me exactly that: to be with me, or not be at all.

And we both loved it.  I'm not entirely to the point of forgiving myself the role I played in her life, but at the same time I'm increasingly aware we each knew what we wanted and what we were doing.  Any claims I made to her that leaving would be in her interest were met with exactly the same defiance I would have (and did) present in response to such presumption.  She'd rather die by her own hand than accept limits placed upon her by others, or for that matter, by herself.  And, well, she did precisely that.  I guess that (and her extensive interest in reading and masturbating to snuff erotica, and fetish for suffering, and her drinking habit, and about a thousand other ways she screamed 'I want to die' in every way possible including the literal) is why I no longer really feel sorry for her.  She wanted the suffering to stop, and it did.  At least for her.

So I've forgiven her for what she did to herself.  Her life was the exquisite suffering of having all the doors of perception cleansed and thrown wide open, she was too stubborn to close them, and she wanted it to end.  Presented with these axioms, suicide is a logical conclusion.  I can't even fault her for the second.  The overwhelming focus of my life has been to gain the strength and grace to  withstand, even thrive upon, the immediacy and magnitude of sensation and emotion I find at times of rare courage.  Everything I do falls from that, and in general I'd rather err on the side of too little strength and grace than too much shielding.  As such I'm inclined to be more forgiving than many would.

The trouble is those three axioms aren't sufficient.  Other people factor into the decision, or should have.  In the end I think that, had she presented it to me in the right way, I would have let her go willingly.  I simply cannot draw an arbitrary line between the choice to end suffering due for emotional reasons versus for physical ones.  In both cases there's a certain stubbornness, in refusing to adapt to circumstance or make compromises (a progressive loss of physical function, say, or a life spent drugged into stupor).  Her family never would have been able to do accept it, but I'm pretty certain that I could.  But she didn't do it that way, though; she snuck away in the night like a thief, stealing something precious from everyone dear to her.  That's the bright line crossed, the part I have yet to forgive.  In the end what offends me so in this is that suicide, at least that sort of suicide, is the acme of selfishness.  For all she decried my narcissistic aloofness and claimed to be oriented to community and family, she was the one who betrayed them.

Or, I say I would have let her go.  Thing is, I've just talked myself into a Mobius strip.  Was I really that stubborn?  I guess when presented with the challenge of having my sacrum screwed into a light socket, my emotional maturity and willingness to do right by her disappeared.  We both got our rocks off on doing the wrong thing, not the right thing -- on shouting "fuck you" to the judgments of others, the bounds of common sense, the fates, and just about every other limit we could find.  Trite sound bite or not, being bad does feel pretty good, huh?   So had I possessed even an inch of distance from this thrill ride, maybe I could have let her die in metaphor instead.

This whole process of grieving and adapting has done something odd to the topology; I do find myself on the same part of the manifold but facing the other way at times.  I'm not sure whether the changes are for the better or not, probably a bit of both.  Thing is, for all it bordered on arrogance -- hell, it plunged deep into its territory shock-and-awe style -- people responded positively to the self-confidence I had.   I didn't hold back like I do now, I wasn't shielded and attenuated like I am now.  I'm sure it'll go; there are a few people dear to me who are chipping away at it.  By now I know I won't be the same though.  Cockiness was an act to begin with and now it feels like a shirt that's too big to fit anymore; even self-confidence is a little baggy in the shoulders.



I don't mean to suggest my life is "All P, all the time".  It's not.  I finished my comprehensive exams, and I'm still recovering from that.  My wife has been through an awful lot herself recently, from the pain and rage of witnessing my own grief and transformation largely impotently (though not as much as she probably thinks), to holding the household together, to stupid boy problems (stupid applying to both the boys and the problems).  She never asked for any of it but she does it nonetheless.  That is love, doing right by me, in a way P could never understand.  Then too, there's are others supportive and loving, who help me laugh and cry, give me space to adore and be adored gracefully, help me find the ground when I lose it, knit the frayed edges of my soul back together, light the fires and put them out.  This could go turn into a litany of shout-outs and it might never be finished.  I am incredibly blessed by the love and support of people who (inexplicably it seems at times) seem to tolerate my flaws and my often very limited availability.  No "poor me" here, and this isn't a fishing expedition, I'm just grateful, that's all.

Part of it is that I can talk about P behind her back now without feeling like I'm breaking confidence.  But another part is that P -- her death and her life -- has unfortunately become one of those fixed points in the convoluted and shifting topology of my consciousness, a black hole which tends to suck everything else in whenever it gets too close.  It's shrinking though, boiling away in halves, the virtual suddenly made real.  And until it disappears, or at least shrinks to navigable size, I might as well use it to slingshot into the deeper spaces in my mind every now and then.  I'm foolish enough to do it regardless, but fortunate enough to have stars to navigate home by.

Yesterday I took (and passed) the oral phase of my comprehensive exams, having finished the written part the week before.  Towards the end I was typically working or studying 18 hours a day, which from what I understand, is about par for the course in this sort of thing.  I desperately need a vacation.

Today I've been recovering.  I decided I needed a hot dog; it's not a craving I get often but when I get one, I know it won't go away until I give in.  So I went to the gourmet hot dog joint uptown (no, it's not an oxymoron).  On my way out I was glancing at the local paper's annual "best of" survey, when the woman standing next to me blurted out the name of the restaurant where P used to work.  P was actually quite good at it, surprisingly enough to both she and I.  Anyway, it turns out, I discovered in short order, the woman standing next to me was the person hired as P's replacement.  I do live in a small university town, but even so, the synchronicity is as bizarre as it is unpleasant.

I guess the past four weeks were the vacation.

It's been a bit since I've posted, mostly because I've been working on comprehensive exam questions.  When I'm not working on comprehensive exam questions, I'm studying, and when I'm not studying, I'm trying to make order out of chaos on my computer.

I'm surviving winter, albeit with considerable assistance and without much grace.  I'm tracking the little successes -- making it to the gym all week, making sure the garbage gets taken out, getting up in the morning -- and trying not to look off to the horizon in terror.  And in the process I'm finding myself less emotionally overwhelmed.  I actually made it a couple of days without crying or wanting to.

I guess the grief process has lost a certain sacred component, an almost fetishistic or ritualized attachment to being consumed.  I miss it, to be frank, but I also realize that as much as it felt at the time like I was facing reality, what I was really doing was distracting myself by playing a role and riding the roller-coaster.  That's easy for me, because emotional intensity neither scares nor threatens me.  It's the quiet moments of missing P -- not as an object of such incredible desire but just as a person -- that are so difficult.

In a way it feels like the previous two months' worth of emotional dysregulation were just a fancy sort of denial.  I'm learning that grief is an active process, a discipline which requires sobriety not just in the obvious sense but, more crucially, in maintaining emotional stability.  Until now I would have thought that to be a contradiction; I assumed grief was about being sad or wracked with pain or guilty, about feeling something so overwhelming you couldn't help but orbit it like a moth around a streetlamp.  It's not, though, at least not now.  I'm orbiting it, but I'm doing it consciously, looking at the thing from all angles and teasing it apart.

Not to restate the incredibly fucking obvious but the whole thing is such an incredible waste.  P's final act made a mockery of so much she claimed to stand for, and while I do understand it was done out of incredible pain, it was also, when you boil it down, done largely out of spite.  If it were pain alone, she would have gone to the doctor.  Spite is about ego.

Ego -- by which I mean a conscious sense of (or model of) the self, not being egotistical -- is a strange thing.  So far as I know we're the only animals susceptible to sunk-cost fallacy.  In order to be susceptible to that sort of delusion you have to be attached to your own self-image so strongly you're willing to be obviously stupid rather than being wrong.  The image I have of the ego in these sorts of situations is bashing your head against a brick wall, and then getting angry at the wall for giving you a headache.  P's suicide was her shouting "fuck you" to the wall at the top of her lungs and then beating herself to death against it.  I got to be part of that wall, but then, so did the rest of the world.  I guess I think P decided she'd rather die than be wrong (about me or herself).

Knowing and accepting how incredibly frustrating she could be, how famously inflexible and judgmental, I still miss her.  She really did try hard within the parameters of her curious selfishness.  Everyone has good qualities (hell I'm sure even Stalin was nice to puppies), but I still maintain she had those in greater abundance (and certainly with greater potential) than many gave her credit for.  But, yes, she was a pain in the ass.  I miss her anyway.

Death is such a fucking waste.  Life overall is tenacious, but the individual life is incredibly fragile.  There is so much structure and information present in the tiniest of creatures; once you get to the human mind, well, the thought of all that reduced to simple entropy in a few short hours is just inconceivable to me.  Life is a constant flow of structure evolving and decaying, I get that, but I think I like the latter better when it happens at a comfortable distance.

P told me many stories and I've remembered so few of them.  In the end I guess that's all we really have of one another, the memories and stories we pass along.  She and I spent most of our time together intoxicated in one way or another, with too little left over to really learn about each other.  I remember fragments of some of the stories but not much else, and I hate that I wasn't paying enough attention.  I ask myself, now, what in the universe could possibly have been more important than learning and bearing witness to the life experiences of someone whom I loved?  Instead what I remember isn't really about her, but about me: how she made me feel, the qualities she had I liked, the time we had together.  I can be so incredibly selfish at times.

Nobody's really unique.  Then again I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't have a story I've never heard before.  I want to come through this willing and able to listen to those stories, rather than run away at the thought they may someday be all I have left of someone.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, there was a condition in ancient Greece known as opsophagos, an eating disorder in which people gorged themselves on fish. Like eating disorders in modern times this was seen in a moral context, as a failure of self-control as opposed to simply a bad idea. I have to wonder whether opsophagos and the more modern culture-specific eating disorders are in part about rebellion against cultural taboos and a declaration of one's inalienable right to be unhealthy: to the opsophagic a taboo against indulging in sensuality, to the anorexic, perhaps a taboo against not indulging.

Then again, I don't really know very much about history, and anything I come up with is likely to be hopelessly trite. Being in a PhD program has really made me understand I don't know nearly as much as I thought, and the longer I'm here, the less certain I am of anything. I suspect that's one of the points, and maybe the most important one, at least in the sciences. I can only hope that grad school in other fields cultivates a similar skepticism and humility both about knowledge in general and about one's own intelligence and education.

For whatever reason I've always been drawn to people in the humanities (idunno, maybe it makes me feel more human). This notably includes dating several women who had been, were at the time, or were considering being, history majors or graduate students, which in turn notably includes both P and my first serious lover, 3M (I'll get there). My wife was at one time seriously considering it (being a history major, I mean, not dating one).

I'm guess I'm just not all that interested in being in a serious relationship with someone in the sciences; I suppose I prefer balance. People in the humanities have a different way of looking at the world, what 3M referred to as a “different, but equally valid, way of knowing”. The “equally valid” part took awhile to sink in, but I've lost at least a little arrogance since dating her. I myself have a difficult time with history. Maybe I think too much in terms of connection and coincidence and causality, rather than knowing the world through stories both broad and specific. In some cases causality seems more obvious (piss off an entire populace and they tend to be rather nasty towards you), in others I'm just unable to tease out meaning.

I once took a course in medieval witchcraft and demonology. My interest didn't come from seeing myself as a neopagan agnostic; the instructor emphasized, and I find myself agreeing, that the subject was largely unrelated to pre-Christian folk religion and entirely unrelated to modern-day witchcraft. It interested me because witch-hunts, political or cultural, seem to show up reliably at times of change and I think that says something important. I didn't do as well on the final paper as I'd hoped; the instructor said that I took a “shotgun” approach to all the potential causes. I just didn't have the sophistication at the time to see things in terms of proximate factors and ultimate factors, those which determined the particular group targeted versus those which led an entire culture to want to do that sort of thing in the first place. I still don't, to be frank, but I find it interesting to think about. Ultimately, though, I suspect any real understanding requires 3M's “different way of knowing”.

3M was, as I said, my first real lover (maybe even girlfriend) after getting married. I botched it horribly, of course, and though I did eventually learn from the experience, it took me until our relationship had ended and I'd had time to let go. At times I've thought she was entirely too forgiving of my clumsiness, but I suppose part of love is accepting and forgiving such things in each other. And I really did love her; that became apparent not in the moments of all-consuming, opsophagic passion, but in the quiet moments where I found myself willing to be open-minded and try to grow up a little. She inspired me to be a better person (though being drunk on testosterone tended to get in the way), and if that's not love, I don't know what is. She was finishing her history degree when I met her, and capable of seeing both the network of relationships and the stories in a way I never could.

Back when I was dating her I probably would have tried to understand opsophagos in terms of something silly like pharmacology (all that fish oil). Now I tend to feel that such simplistic causal relationships really only exist at the intermediate levels of organization – chemistry and classical physics and such – but disappear either when you go too far down (into quantum physics which I'll admit I know next to nothing about) or too far up (to psychology, sociology, history, and such). So while maybe some factor about fish – its popularity at the time, or geography, or what-have-you – made it the particular subject of this obsession, the real question is why the obsession in the first place. Greek gluttons could have been gorging themselves on mutton and it would have amounted to the same thing.

Sometimes I wonder if things are a bit like Fisherian runaway, also called runaway sexual selection. Stalk-eyed flies are as good an example as any of this. At some point in the annals of evolution some female fly was born with a preference for mates with eyes far apart. Their offspring wound up with genes for widely-spread eyes and genes for preference in the same in a mate. By chance, the faintly fetishistic fly family wound up separated enough from the rest of the flies for the genes to become prevalent. Once that happened, that branch of the family tree was sufficiently kinky and sufficiently deformed to be uninterested in the other flies (and vice versa). From there it's an easy step to becoming another species, one with eyes on long stalks.

This process offers an explanation for all sorts of weirdness in the animal kingdom for which other explanations fall short. Take peacocks for example. The problem with explaining a male peacock's tail as advertisement of strength is that the tail is so gigantic it actually makes them considerably weaker. Fisherian runaway also provides an answer for the rather embarrassing fact that giraffes, with their long necks, actually don't eat the leaves high up in the trees. On the other hand, male giraffes do fight each other with them, and female giraffes prefer the winners of such fights. And somehow in all of this we have thousands of inexplicably beautiful butterflies with a sense of aesthetics rivaling our own.

How this fits together is this. A particular preference for big flashy tails, eyes on stalks, pretty wings, long necks, or big fancy brains good for flirting might have been a result of chance or some unlikely factor. But the existence of Fisherian runaway owes itself more broadly to things like sexual reproduction and genetic drift and evolution in general. The “widely spread eyes are hott” gene is a proximate cause, but the others are the ultimate ones. Those ultimate causes are like horny sailors on leave for whom any girl will do; if it hadn't been stalk eyes, it might have been pretty wings. I wonder if something similar goes on in history all the time; if it does, I'm largely ignorant of it.

In the end though when dealing with pretty wings there's got to be an element of the Butterfly Effect at play here. It's easy in hindsight to think we know what's going on, but that doesn't give us insight into which butterfly might someday beat its wings just so, leading to the hurricane which kills off all the girl butterflies except the one who really likes mauve. Our children will just have to guess where the new species of purple butterflies came from. Again, causality tends to disintegrate when you look at the wrong scale or level of organization. And again, if this happens in history, I'm unsure; I have suspicions, but knowing about the existence of an effect in general gives no insight into how and where it applies.

Among the butterflies in my own history was one which landed a bit over ten years ago on the finger of SD. She, a delightfully young and shimmery 40something, met me at a time when I had largely given up on sensuality and passion of any sort. To put it simply, she showed me the error of my ways. And somehow, the butterflies listened to her. She reached over and touched her finger to my bare chest, and the butterfly hopped on, staying there basking in the sun as she kissed me softly. I went from an ascetic to a sybarite in one sunny afternoon, and since then it's been a challenge to not get completely lost in the sensual and passionate world around me.

In the end, what is balance anyway? Maybe there are circumstances in which reason is overrated, in which the pleasures of opsophagos are worth the risks and the scorn of more temperate souls. I suppose it's all in choosing the right sort of fish.

I fucking hate winter.  At least, I hate winter here.

Here the air is heavy and thick and humid and stale.  The sky goes from black to charcoal to a blotchy grey, a light drizzle coming down.  I've been several places around the east coast and midwest and it feels like about the only thing that changes are the allergens, the shade of grey, and whether it's unbearably humid in the summer or groin-grabbingly cold in the winter.  Usually both.

I once went to visit a friend in southern Arizona in the dead of winter.  Within four days of being in the continual unattenuated sunshine and the dry mountain air, I felt young, weightless, so full of words and ideas I felt ready to burst.  I returned back and everything I saw was changed for awhile; I noticed the subtle reflections, the interplay of light and shadow and color, the sounds and the smells I'd never really paid attention to.  In four days, I'd become aware and clear-headed.  In two weeks I was back to being half dead.

It's not as if I expect bitching about it to change anything; I don't.  But when I'm sitting here staring into a really bright light, feeling mostly hollow except for a vague but stupifying buzzing sensation inside with occasional flashes of fear at being trapped in a prison with no walls, it's hard not to say fuck it to everything and head alone into the desert for a week.  At least giving flesh to my nemesis means I can visualize myself punching it in the nuts.

Just another day of walking through the fire, I guess.

I started my comps last week.  The first of five written exam questions is over, finished at 4:30AM Thursday night.  It's been a welcome distraction which, unfortunately, ceased to be distracting some time this morning.  To be frank, it's taking everything I have these days not to crawl into a hole.  I cried for a bit, then the tears stopped coming, and I just sat there, dumbstruck, thinking for some reason about the silly zebra costume P wore to Halloween one year.  I'm pretty sure this is state four.

There were a lot of ways in which that girl didn't really match well with me, in which I felt she wasn't my peer.  She lacked sophistication, and she had no passion for life (and far too much for the opposite).  But at the same time she was smart, fun, silly (bordering on the idiotic), but balanced with emotional honesty and insights about the most surprising of things.  On social issues especially she was truly open-minded and willing and able to change her mind.  Genuinely good-natured inside, which I am not.  Possessing a certain emotional honesty and courage, albeit coming from an inability to compartmentalize and a lack of boundaries.  Unselfish in intent (though, selfish in actuality, which is probably a zero sum outcome) .  Never the devil or the angel that I've felt her to be (though, never really believed; I'm at least self-aware enough to know this even if my heart is busy trying to make love to or be repulsed by her memory).

She had an ability to inhabit the space around her gracefully.  That's something I can't really do.  I'm good with chaos, not so good with structure.  Structure felt constraining to me, chaos freeing.  She was the opposite, and I think that's part of what went wrong.  We were both aware of being each other's shadows to some degree, but that knowledge didn't really help us as much as we'd hoped.  But it did, a little.  I got better about being on time for things, she got better at handling if I was a little late or if we needed to change plans.

Mostly.  Part of what influenced her to take the flying leap into the abyss was my canceling out on plans we'd made.  I won't take full responsibility for her suicide, but I do have to acknowledge how she was affected by my choices.  I did it for the selfishest of reasons: I wanted to spend that weekend doing something fun, rather than being with her while her ex-boyfriend (from several years back) was getting married.  I knew it would inevitably lead to the same set of uncomfortable questions about why I couldn't or wouldn't wave my magic wand and suddenly be capable of marrying her.  Not to mention willing to.  But still, I fucked up on a friend level, and she never trusted me again after that like she did before.

She forgave me more than I had any right to expect.  Probably more than I wanted her to.  I wouldn't be the first guy to play the "if I piss you off enough maybe you'll fall out of love with me" game.  Or maybe it wasn't about that at all.  It did genuinely anger and frustrate me that she refused at some level to see me as anything other than genuinely good and simply misguided or foolish.  And I did start to lose interest in her towards the end.  But I did tell her all of that, and suggest we'd both be better off moving on.  I guess accepting it was too much for her, on top of the rest of the mess in her life.  And I guess now I get to move on without her.

So I have another four or five weeks of taking the written comprehensive exam questions and studying for the oral before the oral exam in early January.  Coming in the darkest days of winter in an economic and personal crisis it feels a bit like I'm walking through fire.  But I guess it's a bit like how P managed survival for as long as she did; it's easy to do the difficult and scary when you don't feel you have any other viable choice.

Unsurprisingly I've been having dreams about P.  The night before last, she was a vampire leading a horde of others and I was doing my best to drive a stake through her heart.  I love it when whoever's running the dream factory goes on vacation and leaves his slightly mentally retarded brother Captain Obvious running the helm.

Last night, I don't even know what to make of it.  In last night's dream I'd gone to see P's mother and we wound up sleeping together.  I woke up a sweaty tangle not sure whether to be creeped out more by the fact that I'd had the dream, or the fact that, in the dream, I found it intensely erotic.

I'm coming to understand that my failures with P, the things I did which hurt her so, weren't primarily as a lover but as a friend.  I'm really a very good lover.  I'm just not always a very good friend.  And I'm uninterested in any further relationships of any real consequence in which I'm not willing or capable of fulfilling the duties of friendship.  What I find so puzzling at times is how, to many, love and friendship seem to be almost diametrical opposites: your friend is someone with whom you are honest, your lover someone whom you manage with deceit.  That I find it so natural myself to fall into the latter behavior, and that so many others do as well (no matter what indignant protestations arise in failed defense) suggests there's something deeply fucked up about our society.  Maybe we're all so incredibly bitter over the need for sexual release that we take it out on those whom we fuck.

If there's such a thing as Attention Surfeit Disorder, I probably have it.  Ditto for the counterpart to ADHD, Attention Surfeit and Inactivity Disorder (well, maybe that's too much.  I'm not lazy at all, I just work hard at things of no value whatsoever).  I've heard second-hand that people characterize me as having a short attention span where people are concerned.  I'm a little offended by that, especially the implication that I lose interest quickly.  I don't; it's just that interest in one person doesn't preclude interest in another when I'm no longer in the presence of the first.  Among the many ways this habit of attention gets me into trouble is that I don't maintain a wide enough perspective to realize just how fucking unproductive I am.

We're visiting my friend J who just finished her dissertation defense in the humanities.  She's been working on her degree for about a decade.  That's evidently fairly normal in her field, where you basically hold tenure until you're dead.  She's incredibly focused, diligent, and self-disciplined.  She starts assignments as soon as she gets them, finishes them on time, works the expected hours of the grad student and then some.  I'm pretty much her exact opposite, getting by on flashes of insight in a pan of procrastination and apathy which about half the time turn out to be worthless pyrite.  I tell people this and they tell me "no, every grad student thinks they don't work hard enough" and I feel like I have to shake them and say "no, I'm not kidding.  Really."

The problem is that I Just.  Don't.  Care.  I care passionately about about a billion things in my life, so passionately that I've nearly destroyed myself at times in pursuit of them, but making computational models of the same fucking cluster of nerves people have been looking at for the past three decades is not among them.  It's not a good sign, but I'm committed (as much as I'm ever committed to anything, which is not much) to slogging through this until I get my piece of paper and moving on with my life.  I guess I chose this path in the hopes of obliterating my childish resentment over having to do something I have so little passion for, in the face of so many things I do have passion for, none of which I can turn into a career.

So here I am, creeping towards 40 years old, incredibly unprolific in my new field of choice, trying to escape the chicken-and-egg cycle of complete apathy towards what the world thinks of me, low expectations of myself, and lack of self-discipline.  Good fucking luck, huh.  Believe it or not I was actually doing quite well just a bit over two years ago.  And then a 23 year old emailed me and proceeded to show me that most of what I thought I knew about my desires, my strengths, my weaknesses, my behavior was complete bullshit.  And I spent two irreplacable years wallowing in pheromonal intoxication, my body (and hers) screaming an aeons-old evolutionary imperative.  And for the first time in my life I truly understood why people do the incredibly fucking stupid things they do.  The problem with schmoos isn't that they so bad, but that they so good.  What's the point of doing anything else when there's schmoos everywhere?

Only I couldn't completely succumb to it.  There's more to me than the genetic desire to breed, much more.  I resented myself for being reduced to that, and I resented P much more.  I hated that her body was so soft, that she smelled like danger and delight and mind-numbing comfort, that she tasted like butter and honey, that Alph the sacred river flooded whenever I stood near, that everything about her screamed out for colonization and I perpetually found myself holding a flag.  I hated it so because the tendrils of opium smoke curling out of damp dark places were wrapping around my neck, choking off the fierceness and the expansive shimmer that made me feel alive and free.  Jenny Holzer was right: protect me from what I want.

I still miss her, I still hunger for her, I still hate her, and I still can't believe she's gone.  I mean that quite literally: I imagine and remember her as if, when I get home, I'm going to head over to her apartment for a glass of cheap wine, press my lips against hers, and fuck her up against the wall with one hand around her throat leaving her gasping for air.  It's never going to happen, and as hideous as this is to say, in many ways I'm incredibly lucky for that.


She had a smell to her.  I don't mean that literally, or if I do it's more subtle than the scent of her body.  I've smelled it before, and I smelled it since once.  A dear undergraduate friend here, for whom I haven't come up with a clever alias or acronym yet, seems to have developed a nemesis in the form of a not terribly attractive 19 year old with a penchant for seducing older men (including many of my friend's friends and exes).  She has that same smell to her: a desperate hunger that says "take me, colonize me, own my very being, and plant your seed in my belly".  She fancies herself a predator.  I suppose a sheep with a wolf fetish might too, but in this case, I'm not sure who's consuming whom.  So of course I want to fuck the shit out of her in an explosion of fury and contempt that leaves her stunned with its intensity.  But I won't.  I may not have the capacity to avoid it for my own sake, but my undergraduate friend needs at least one person in her life who isn't a complete shit to her.  And I actually do love her.  Not in the romantic sense, mind you, but in the truest way possible.  She is my friend.